Centralized information retrieval has a large number of well known drawbacks.
Most of them can be overcame with distributed information retrieval
architectures.

Even with important research done, a lot of work is still needed before
distributed information retrieval systems become a real alternative to the
popular Internet search services, based on centralized architectures.

Webtrieve is a prototype system and it
is intended to be used as an user friendly testbed to evaluate selection,
fusion, allocation, replication and other relevant algorithms and components
in distributed information retrieval framework.

Webtrieve architecture includes all the needed components to evaluate not
only each algorithm by itself, but also the performance of the
possible combinations of the available algorithms for different system
components.